Welcome to the Hog Blog, a blog chronicling minor-league baseball in the Lehigh Valley. Tom Housenick, The Morning Call's IronPigs beat writer, has been at The Morning Call since 2008. In a previous lifetime, he was at Lackawanna County Stadium in Moosic talking with future Phillies Jimmy Rollins, Pat Burrell, Shane Victorino and Ryan Howard, among many others.
He’ll now be spending his summers in search of who the Phillies are hoping to be the next Chase Utley and Cole Hamels plus any outfielder who catch and hit. What he really hopes to find are the next Mariano Rivera, Todd Helton and Jim Thome --- great human beings who happened to be great at this sport.
He spent the last five years covering Colonial League football, college basketball and high school track & field.

An MLB.com report, citing an Oct. 11 story in a Canadian newspaper, said cocaine possession charges against Phillies minor league outfielder Tyson Gilles in Florida have been dropped.

Gilles lawyer for the case, Kevin Hayslett, told the Kamloops, British Columbia, Daily News that the state decided not to continue with the case against the Canadian outfielder after looking at the evidence.

Gilles was arrested on August 20 on charges stepping for a June 11 incident. Police said an officer found Gilles trying to flag down cars on a Pinellas County highway in the early morning hours of June 11 looking for a ride back to his hotel after leaving a local club. The officer gave Gilles a ride back to the hotel, then found a small bag of white powder on the floor in the patrol car.

Gilles was arrested after tests showed the powder was cocaine.

Gilles, who had pleaded not guilty to the charges, told his hometown newspaper that he was glad the incident was over but "I'm still very upset that it happened to me and that my character, which I've worked so hard to build, can even be questioned.

"... I was drug-tested five hours after the incident happened and it had obviously come back negative. I know who I am and what I'm about as a person and was stunned [with] the thing I had to go through."

Gilles, acquired last winter in the trade that sent Cliff Lee to Seattle, struggled through an injury-plagued season at Reading last summer, hitting only .238 in 26 games. Despite that season Gilles, who will turn 22 n Halloween, has a career .312 average in four minor-league seasons.